It's comfortably warm in the Komp family's Swedish home in Lollar, Hesse.

Not only in the rustic parlor with the wood-paneled ceiling, but also in the light and airy living room.

Three tiled stoves provide warmth.

The high number of ovens in this single-family home is no coincidence.

Over the course of several decades, the now eighty-year-old landlord has assembled more than 800, mainly Swedish, round ovens.

"In this respect, this is only a small excerpt," smiles Hasso Komp.

While collectors of, say, vintage guitars hang their trophies on the wall, lovers of owl figurines or clocks present them in their own showcases, or classic car fans put an ensemble in their garage, most of the ovens are inventoried, dismantled and broken down packed in boxes in storage rooms.

Some of them haven't been unpacked for fifty years.

Hasso Komp was only in his mid-twenties when the weakness for old tiles awoke.

When his daughter Anna asked how one could be interested in something so old at such a young age, he answered with a shrug.

After all, that's such a thing with passions.

Buy, secure, store

At that time Komp was in Vienna, both professionally and privately, with an art-loving friend on a discovery tour of farmhouses.

"There are wonderful examples of stoves in the Alpine region."

But it was the late sixties and early seventies, the new oil heating replaced the stoves as the former heart of the house, and the two friends bought what the farmers no longer wanted.

Without a goal, but with a hunting instinct.

"Buying, securing, storing - the whole thing was ultimately born out of chaotic circumstances," says the businessman in retrospect.

Today he still owns around 150 of the pieces that he has collected.

The collection had grown on a large scale after he became aware of the round ovens in their home country through his Swedish wife.

Komp was thrilled.

A Swedish tiled stove master acted as an intermediary for the collector.

The ovens came to Germany by freight train.

“We're not talking about five or ten, but about 250 and 300 copies,” says Komp.

After the Thirty Years' War, the Swedes, who had not known this type of heating until then, developed the particularly slim and up to 2.60 meter high furnace type based on the basic furnace principle.

In doing so, they would have oriented themselves towards the Swiss tower furnace.

The round shape has the advantage that there are no dead beam angles.

In Protestant Sweden, stove builders opted for a greatly reduced figure.

"These are not ornamental hums, but very simple bodies," says Komp.

The simplest ovens are smooth, white, and strict.

Others have a modeled foot and middle ledge and look a little more elaborate with a slightly playful frieze and crown.

Some are adorned with floral decors, less common are those with colored tiles such as petrol.

It took time for the stove to become a striking interior design detail in Sweden and elsewhere. It was not until the end of the 19th century that architects in Vienna and Darmstadt began to adopt tiled stove designs. These stoves became eye-catchers.

In Sweden they were staged by the planner Ferdinand Boberg. He made a number of Art Nouveau specimens that came into Komp's possession, most of which he has since resold. For example, two are in a house near Frankfurt and one in Würzburg. Another “Boberg” adorns an unusual new building in Dortmund. It is no coincidence that the client there is an architect. One, perhaps the only stove that can be shown to have been built according to a design by the Prussian master builder Schinkel, also belonged to the collection for a while. The frieze with the Prussian eagle did not look anything, judged Ms. Komp. Buyers from Zurich found the copy.

Because at some point it was no longer just about owning and wanting to have.

Komp had integrated two ovens into the house built in 1980.

The third stove in the style of postmodernism is an own design.

"I thought I had to leave something behind for posterity, but that was a crazy idea," he waves him off.

The imposing furnace did not go into production, and economically it was a flop.

You cannot work with antique stoves without expert knowledge

And all the unique items stored?

Komp had already started advertising in the seventies.

Every now and then, architects and builders contacted us who were renovating an old house, or those who wanted to make their new building in exposed concrete more comfortable.

He brought his collection to a company called GITA, which also sells replicas.

Daughter Anna is now taking care of this uncomplicated part of the furnace business.

"What is new on offer just looks like this, but is completely different on the inside," explains Komp.

While buyers pay between 6000 and 7000 euros for the replicas, depending on the size and design, there are simple antique ovens a little cheaper.

Special pieces, however, can cost around 23,000 euros.

Expert knowledge is required for the assembly and commissioning of the antique pieces - and that hardly exists anymore.

It takes about a week to set up an old stove.

In a high phase, Komp was able to rely on four experienced master tiled stove builders, today there are still two.

"But that's finite."